Friday, April 25, 2025 at 4:00 pm
A monthly lecture series featuring the UB Humanities Institute’s Faculty Fellows for the current academic year, hosted at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q + A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camraderie and conversation, but you can also join the livestream via the Hallwalls website.
State interest in films about the rural South coalesced in Georgia from the 1940s to 1960s. Pilcher’s talk traces the short-lived Southern Educational Film Production Service, a nonprofit service for government agencies in the southeast. Chartered by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the unit operated in Athens, Georgia with a team of progressive filmmakers, mostly well-educated White men with humanitarian aims. Two productions and their afterlives reveal the experiment’s White masculine perspective toward institutional development in the South and tensions between representing rural communities to facilitate social change and promoting their modernization by segregated government agencies.
Loren Pilcher is an assistant professor in the department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies who researches at the intersection of film and media and American cultural studies with a focus on images of gender, race, and sexuality. They specialize in nonfiction films made outside of entertainment cultures, with a current focus on how and why institutional sponsors have used moving images to represent people and places in the US. Their ongoing book project considers government films made in the mid-twentieth century American South—particularly a wave of film production in Georgia that imagined gender, race, and rurality in the changing segregated region for wider use.
They have published articulations of this research in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and Southern Cultures, in addition to a forthcoming article in a special Government Film issue of The Moving Image and an essay contribution to the edited collection A Century in 16mm forthcoming from Oxford University Press. They also gave an invited presentation at “Films of State: Moving Images Made by Governments,” a conference hosted by the US National Archives and Records Administration. Their work on queer theories of image archives and nontheatrical film has also appeared in Synoptique and The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema.